


Reflection

by Palpalou



Series: Cold And Soft As Satin [2]
Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: (of a kind), Class Issues, M/M, Pre-Canon, Relationship Problems, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2020-12-27 23:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21127196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palpalou/pseuds/Palpalou
Summary: Brutus discovers the bust.





	1. Discovery

One day, of course, Brutus found the bust.

Maybe it was Antony’s fault. He loved having Brutus in his rooms.

A personal triumph, in both senses of the word. Brutus tended to prefer anonymous meeting places and had to be induced to follow him all the way to his home, let alone to the parts of the house which did not belong to public affairs. At the very least, it required getting rid of or bribing his brothers away for the day, which did not come cheap. And it was always glorious to _have_ Brutus, whatever the location.

Even entertaining Brutus in his rooms would have been fine, had been done before, but he had been, they had both been, probably, a bit too wild with wine, and what had started on the bed had continued half-on-half-off, then resolutely on the ground.

In his defence, it was one of the warmest days of that summer and one could only fight so long against itchy, sweat-soaked linens. The stones were a welcome coolness against their skin. Brutus was running hot, but with pleasure and passion, Antony could only love that, and press together as much of their bodies as he could, on hands and knees, Antony breathing rhythmically against Brutus' shoulder blade.

Then Brutus stopped moving his hips back, grew still and stiff. And he said, in a tone that raised Antony’s hair, “There’s someone under your bed.”

The soldier in Antony had him tensing, already mentally scrambling for the closest weapon (a stiletto, on his desk) before fully parsing the words.

Not many people could have fit under Antony’s bed, which was quite low on the ground. There was also the bust, taking space under there… and Antony abruptly realised that’s what had spooked Brutus.

Brutus didn’t close his eyes during sex. Brutus didn’t even close his eyes when they were kissing, Antony had found. He must have spotted light glancing along the edge of the statue’s profile against the gloom and seen a human face.

“That’s nothing”, Antony said, pulling Brutus back on his haunches. He was still inside him, still hard. “It’s just dust.”

But Brutus squirmed and elbowed his way out of his arms, indignant.

“What do you take me for? There’s _something_ under your bed.”

When Antony made no move to follow him up, he crouched back down and pulled the statue out.

Antony looked at him. Brutus was mostly turned away, only a sliver of his face visible above his shoulder, but he was easy to read nonetheless. And Antony was attuned to deciphering him from this particular angle.

He saw bewilderment in the brow and the slackness of the mouth, then a flush rose on Brutus’s cheek, embarrassment and anger.

Anyone else, Antony would have distracted with kisses and clever praise, but those never really worked on Brutus, only served to make him colder.

“If this is another one of your jokes, I don’t understand it at all.”

It had been quite some time since Antony had last looked at the bust.

He had left it behind in Rome when he had gone for his first campaign along Caesar, and on his return he had had a few months of festivities and celebrations to keep him busy, first official ones, then whatever he could find or organise, eager to taste all Rome had to offer again. Even before, taking out the bust had been a rare event, when he was in a mood which did not come to him often.

One of those parties – a semi-official one, of the kind which started stuffy and got really interesting if you stayed long enough – was where he had seen Brutus again.

The last time they had met, Antony was still a child, and although already – barely – a man, Brutus was younger than himself was now. Still, Antony had recognised his lanky figure instantly in the crowd, even with the wine and the smoke. An acquaintance had remarked on his interest and reintroduced them without really being asked.

Brutus hadn’t remembered him.

And yet, a few hours later into the night, he had found himself in one of the darker corners of the villa with the very same Brutus.Tunics hitched just enough to get access, they had rubbed themselves off against each other, Antony’s hands high on Brutus’ thighs and Brutus’ hands roving around his shoulders, his arms and his back. When it was over, Brutus had smiled at him and offered him wine from his cup.

After that, Antony hadn’t thought much about the bust.

He had been taken by his childhood frenzy again, a boiling of the blood which had him chasing Brutus all over town. Except now he was savvier about it, arranged for fortuitous yet easily explainable meetings ranging from the public to the delightfully private, enough to sate his hunger without being too obvious.

Even when his initial appetite for Brutus cooled off, their trysts never became less than regular.

On two or three occasions, they even happened in Caesar’s house, whether they happened to be there both at the same time by chance, or they played truant during one of Caesar’s more panroman gatherings. Although they never went further than a spot of furtive fondling in that particular setting.

All the same, Brutus never showed the slightest hint of déjà vu.

“I don’t have to take this, you know. This… crassness of yours.”

Antony blinked. It was fortuitous that Brutus had no interest in politics, because talking never seemed to go anywhere but downhill with him.

“What’s crass about me?”

Brutus’ mouth twisted, his eyes sent daggers. The sun streaming in from the window made the length his naked body glow. Under other circumstances, Antony would have enjoyed the view, but he was getting annoyed.

“You’re—You’re ill-bred! And you speak like a soldier. And you have no respect for anything!” He stopped for a moment. He seemed surprised at what had come out of his mouth. He gestured at the bust. “Did you steal this from my mother’s home?”

Antony felt a smile stretch his face. Or a rictus. He was angry now.

“I’ve never set _foot_ in your mother’s home. I found it in the Pontine Marshes last week, it reminded me of you.”

Brutus gaped at him. Antony bared his teeth.

If it had been him in Brutus' place, he would have flung the bust at his own head, but Brutus was a _well-bred_ Roman boy. He set it down woodenly and marched out of the room, grabbing his clothes on the way.

Antony wanted to laugh at the image of Brutus tripping on the edge of his toga while trying to dress himself on his way out.

He wasn’t going to run after him to see it happen. Still, he listened to the sounds of Brutus walking away. Bare feet on stone, the scuffle of a servant hurrying to see to the guest. When they met at Antony's house, they usually washed and helped each other dress afterwards, but there was always a slave waiting outside with a basin of water.

He was still sitting on the floor, the sun was still streaming in from the window. A few paces away from him, the bust gazed at the wall with its blank, eternally waiting eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *tried to find a biting insult for Mark Antony to deliver, found this on the wiki ancient Rome trash article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome : “From very early times the Romans, in imitation of the Etruscans, built underground channels to drain rainwater that might otherwise wash away precious topsoil, used ditches to drain swamps (such as the Pontine Marshes)”. Let’s all pretend this means he called Brutus the swamp thing.  
**Antony targets Brutus’ low self-esteem. It’s super effective !


	2. Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a way more Victorian than Roman, Antony falls sick.

Antony was unused to illness.

And yet, a dark pestilence had been hounding him for weeks, growing stronger as summer turned to autumn. He slept too much in the day and with difficulty in the night. He felt cold when the slaves told him his flesh was hot. His face was pale, the sclera of his eyes took on a yellowish tint and, at first simply uninterested in his usual food and drink, he found now he could not keep most of it down. His eyes pained him when hit by the full light of day.

A physician was called but only served to send Antony in a rage, first with his insistence that he had been felled not by a disease but by a weakened constitution, then with his petty prescription of garlic and thyme and blood-rich foods.

His salutary anger left him exhausted, dark shapes flitting on the edge of his vision when he moved. He felt cold and unsteady like when he had lost too much blood during a battle, although his flesh was intact and he spent the better part of the day lying down. He didn’t like this at all.

His brothers were away from Rome, Gaius in Greece for his studies, Lucius visiting their mother. He had sent word that he would spend the cold season there. It was only him and the slaves. Antony should have been glad there was no risk of contagion, but he felt lonely, unable to leave the home for company.

“When I’m hurt in battle, I can see the wound, I can have it cared for and see as it knits up and fades that I grow stronger. How do I know how this invisible wound will progress?”

“I don’t know, _dominus_,” the boy by his bed answered. “Are you going to die?”

Antony scoffed and pushed him away.

He sent for a sacrifice to be made in his name in the temple of Aesculapius and had his winter quilts and furs brought to his bed, and he proceeded to wait out the sickness.

Fever made his waking and sleeping hours equally strange.

He saw Caesar; his shape billowing in and out like it was made of cloth, looming above him. Caesar was trying to tell him something, or order something, but his words flew through him like water through a sieve. “I don’t have it”, Antony muttered deliriously. “Why do you ask?”, and after some time Caesar was gone. His father walked by a little later but did not speak. For a few hours, he kept ordering his slaves to let in the dog scratching at his door, and was incensed when the slaves would tell him there was no dog and no scratching.

Once, he dreamt of walking by the Senate with his brothers.

They wore tunics in the same style they used to as children, which looked bizarre on their grown-up bodies, and Antony was, equally incongruously, in his armour.

The throng of the people kept them from approaching too close, but they could see a litter like a brightly-coloured ship crossing the square above the crowd. It was Caesar’s daughter, Julia, in the richly decorated palla of her wedding feast, and the people acclaimed her like they had her father on the day of their return to Rome.

It started raining. First a few fat droplets, then torrents cascading down from the sky.

Julia raised her hands above her head to protect herself, but the rain tore away the draperies of her litter and, under the downpour, even the dye of her clothes started running. Then the skin, where it was visible on her arms, could be seen to start cracking and sluicing off in flakes like the white clay around a bronze sculpture.

Antony looked on with horror and fascination, trying to discern the shape that was left. The other people in the square had disappeared, chased away by the storm. His brothers tried to tug him away too, but he wouldn’t budge, even as he shivered and wiped rain drops away from his brow.

Then the crouching figure unfolded slightly and there was only Brutus, crouching in the sad wooden skeleton of the litter, dressed in sodden white.

This was a thread of memory, woven into the dream. Brutus on the forum, some two weeks after they had parted ways, trailing after his mother like an obedient hound, in his _toga candida_.

At the time, he had laughed at the image even as his eyes devoured Brutus’ pink face –a natural flush or the effect of a rigorous scrubbing– and the shadows under his eyes. His laugh had been loud enough that it could have caused the slight falter in Brutus’ step, this or an uneven stone, but he hadn’t turned, which had made Antony unduly cross. And yet the eyes had made him happy.

But the sight of Brutus in his dream made his own burn. He twisted and turned on his bed, freeing a hand from the sweat-soaked bedsheets to press against his face and woke up with a groan.

He wondered if Brutus had been elected –although there was really no doubt that he had been. It all came easy to him. He just had to let himself be carried by the currents around him. Antony used to think it was the same with him, but now he was sick—dying maybe—and it seemed their rivers did not flow in the same direction.

He hadn’t moved Brutus’ bust since that day when an ugly chasm had opened between them. It was a matter of footsteps to reach it, and gingerly, Antony rose from his bed. He was slightly surprised he managed it. He ached everywhere and the room swayed around him as he toddled his way to the table, but he kept on.

He didn’t know what he intended to do. Did he want to smash the bust to atoms? Or did he want to bring it back to the bed and sleep with it pressed against his brow as he sometimes did as a child? His vision faded out as he arrived at the table and, in the uncoordinated bid to catch his balance, he hit the bust.

It slid across the surface of the table and for a moment it seemed it would be safe but, even as it lost momentum, it reached the edge. It teetered for an instant; then it tipped over and hit the paved floor with a strangely dry sound, followed by tinkling as small shards flew out across the room.

Some of them cut the skin of Antony’s calves, the pain brief but intense like catching on a thorn.

He looked down and felt remote surprise to see his blood was still such a rich red in the thin rivulets of blood that trickled down to his feet.

Brutus’ head had split in two slightly askew halves along a curved line which ran from the top of its head to the juncture of its jaw and neck on the left. Both fragments lay alongside each other, one eye gazing left and the other right, forlorn. Antony stood with one hand on the table for a long time, until he felt his legs tremble under him and he staggered back to his couch.

Two days later, the other Brutus was at his door.

It struck Antony that the breaking of the bust must have been an omen, and an obvious one with hindsight. He would have told his slaves to bar his doors to the insufferable bayard, but he had not conceived at all of Brutus coming to him without being enticed, especially after their fight, especially as even when they were at their most cordial, it was Antony who did the chasing-down.

He was still mostly bed-ridden, his exertions having brought him even lower than he had been before, but the news of Brutus ad portam galvanised him enough to get him up and dressed and into the triclinium to entertain his unexpected guest.

Brutus looked well, though he was fidgety, ginger even as he shook his arm in greeting, Brutus stooping down awkwardly, Antony staying half-sprawled on his couch. The fear of contagion, maybe, although nobody else in the house had fallen ill and so the house hadn’t been marked, or simply the marks of the sickness on Antony. His hands and wrists were bonier, he knew. And of course, he hadn’t been able to visit the baths. And the perfumed water he had splashed on his face and hair could only do so much.

“We heard that the Antonii had had a sacrifice made to the god of health.”

“We?” Antony couldn’t imagine Brutus and his mother gossiping about him. And yet who else was there in that family?

“A… friend of the family has been visiting us. Julius Caesar, you have fought under him. It seems he esteems you.”

Antony should have been flattered Caesar thought well of him, he guessed. Antony had discovered himself a talent at the soldier life and Caesar seemed to have consigned their falling-out to the past. And yet, the idea of Brutus and Caesar, of all people, discussing him, troubled him, especially so soon after Brutus had discovered his own bust in Antony’s possession. It was after all from Caesar’s house that Antony had appropriated it. There was a mystery here of unsounded depth, to which each of them held a key. But Antony didn’t care at all to relinquish his.

“Caesar knows we know each other?”

Brutus looked so visibly shocked and appalled at the idea that Antony realised at once he clearly shouldn’t have worried. The last thing Brutus wanted was for their relation to come to light.

“Of course not! But – well, you couldn’t know, but Caesar is thinking of leaving for Gaul again in the spring.” From Brutus’ look, he was of mixed opinion about this. Was Caesar still fucking his mother? Maybe the visit hadn’t been a wholly happy one. “You’ll leave with him, I imagine. You’ll have time to get better before then.”

What do you care? Antony nearly asked. Why are you here? But Brutus’s brow creased with something like resolution. He rose and walked to Antony’s couch, where he sat by Antony’s hip. It was a stiff move, nearly artificial. And yet Antony’s heart beat faster.

“I’ve missed you, Antony. I think we should put our fight behind us.”

He put his hand on Antony’s thigh, right above the knee, where the muscle was still strong even if some of the fat had wasted away. Antony blinked and bent forward to catch Brutus’ eye. There was no dishonesty that he could perceive there. And yet he couldn’t help but needle a sore which he hadn’t realised he had been nurturing.

“You do? I’m not sure I’m _well-enough _bred to fuck a senator, though.”

Brutus flushed.

“It doesn’t matter, does it? Rome is full of secrets. We just have to be discreet.”

Antony blinked, but he was feeling weak and Brutus was very near, very warm. He kissed his skin where he could reach, just above the collar of his tunic – rich, understated cloth. He wanted to tear it off of him, but he contented himself with pulling Brutus roughly down to sprawl over him.

“Oh, I can be discreet for sure. You have no idea.”

Brutus’ hands stroked down his flank to the apex of his thighs.

“You’re bony…” he muttered. Before, it would have made Antony smile. Brutus always liked his athlete’s build. Now, he wasn’t sure. “There’s just one thing…”

“Oh, just the one?”

Brutus sent him a hesitant look but continued. “…You’ll have to get rid of that bust.”

At that, Antony did show teeth.

“As it happens, it broke quite recently. Shoddy workmanship.”

“Did it?”

“I have the proof on my legs! It wasn’t a cat that made those scratches.” He pointed to his sliced calves.

Brutus looked uncertain, but relief seemed to win out in the end. Then he slipped his hand under Antony’s chiton and Antony found his blood was raised enough that his malady and general weakness were beaten back for a while.

As they moved together, Antony wondered at the strange mix of sentiments in him. He felt Brutus’ presence like a flame, as ever, but when used to be like a kiss of clean fire, now the seed of anger planted when they had last seen each other had grown black roots that smouldered instead of burning away. As he kissed Brutus’ shoulder he wanted to bite deep. Like the bust, Antony’s love was split along the middle.

He had noticed, also, that Brutus hadn’t asked again where Antony had gotten his likeness. Maybe their fight, for him too, had become like a wound that had closed over an infection, bloodless, but too painful to do more than graze with a fingernail.

And yet Brutus pressed back into his hands, and if their lovemaking was rougher at the edges than it used to be, before, neither was fool enough to remark on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *I am fighting Tooth And Nail to dig out some kind of plot ! I also started on season 2 of Rome.


End file.
